Although I have had my iPod Video for about 9 months I seldom watch video on it. I just can't bring myself to pay $2 for an episode of futurama when it is on TV every night. This month I will be installing a Hauppage WinTV-PVRUSB2 capture device on my Kuro and configuring it to automatically record shows and save them in my media directory so I can watch them at a later time with my Buffalo LinkTheater. Since I also have an iPod, as an aded bonus, we'll make the Kuro convert the video captures to the format my iPod uses for viewing on my iPod Video.

The WinTV-PVRUSB2 comes with a remote control, so I'll be configuring the remote to work with my MP3 player, adding the standard set of controls to the MP3 player that are normally seen on a stereo system. I'll also be adding any other functionality that comes to mind as I work through this project.

Build a custom kernel

The first step is to build a 2.6.18-rc3 kernel with V4L and PVRUSB2 support. Also required is the standard kernel support for the USB system. Once that is complete the firmware for the WinTV-PVRUSB2 needs to be extracted from the original windows driver. There were two (or three depending on the particular version) firmware files that needed to be extracted. Luckiny there is a script here that will automatically extract the firmware. The firmware needs to be copied into /lib/firmware. From there it will be loaded into the hardware on boot. In order to get the firmware to load you will need to emerge hotplug, coldplug, and add coldplug to the default runlevel. It goes without saying (although I'm saying it anyway) that udev is also required, of course, your 2.6 kernel will not boot without udev. Once that is done you should see something like the following in your dmesg:

Installing software

Now that the kernel and hardware portion is working it is time to work on the software part of this project. We'll be installing the MythTV backend on the Kuro and with a bit of luck configuring it via some custom scripts to run the iPod conversion.

The first application to install is qt. It contains qmake which is required to configure MythTV so lets emerge it.

emerge qt

We also want to use the remote control that came with the WinTV-PVRUSB2 so we'll need lirc.

emerge lirc

Now lets get started building MythTV. First we'll download the mythTV tarball, untar it and change directories into it, run configure and build it: